I'll recommend people try to find other instances! Think; what are you going to mainly post on your account? General chat, some fandom, some specific interests? Then try that :D

I heard the sweet spot is 500 to 5000 people. The #Fediverse is stronger with smaller, more servers.

(Yes I know I am contradicting what I said literally just yesterday xD I'm still learning!)

@feditips This is a good analogy! But it's a bit flawed -- phone networks (and email servers) aren't themed like Fediverse instances... I think the difference is because phone networks and emails are private, while Fediverse instances are public (which requires curation that's more than just anti-spam).

@humanetech To be honest, "one X to do them all" kinda reminds me of centralisation for efficiency purposes :blobcatthinking:

Unless we have tons of independent lists! ^w^ I think that's the end-goal, right?

For others, the link to the article is likely:

https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introduction-for-2021

@Gargron Ah, and here I was worrying how I’d guide my friend to small servers without the total user count :P my UX intuition was way off. That makes more sense.

@feditips Yes, I understand that the servers don't only talk to themselves :P I was thinking tons of servers federating together to form a fuzzy-boundary topic-specific network.

But I am confused. Could you explain the difference between phone/email servers and Fediverse servers? I'm trying to figure out why one is usually generic (eg gmail, Yahoo) while the other is very interest-specific.

In other words, IMO servers do feel like forums that can federate with tons of similar forums :P

@feditips Thank you for the clarification.

Edit: to be honest, I still find the concept hard to grasp… I understand servers aren’t isolated by default but there’s articles like this: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-may-be-using-mastodon-wrong.html

Right now I have like 5 different accounts (in my bio) LOL which have very diverging interests (for example I feel a bit weird putting eg pup play stuff onto my tech profile xD) but I guess I can always merge them in the future if I feel it’s too much

@humanetech To be honest, "one X to do them all" kinda reminds me of centralisation for efficiency purposes :blobcatthinking:

@humanetech I see! That makes sense :)

@humanetech I am actually doing a personal experiment right now; ditching search engines entirely.

I rely on my existing bookmarks, history, curated portals, Wikipedia (it's curated), and links that I naturally discover (which is thus added into my history).

Going one step further would be a browser extension allowing me to search through the pages I've seen before. Perhaps acting as a local archive.org as well, with maybe auto-delete for old, un-bookmarked pages.

@humanetech @aral

Braindump:

Easier to do things -> More people can do the things -> Smaller communities or even completely P2P.

Example: Moderation in small Telegram groups are so easy, everyone can moderate. It's just one click.

Maintaining a software project is so hard, that the ratio of {people doing it} to {people using it} is high. Too high.

Open hardware -> Easy PCB printing -> Rent vs buy?

Inter-community/inter-person(in P2P context) is very important.

@humanetech Will check out small-tech.org

@Gargron May I ask what’s the reasoning/feedback of removing the total user count from the list? Thank you for your hard work!